Direct Carrier Billing – new laws in the making

Ministry of Digital Affairs is currently working on a novel to the Electronic Communication Law. Amendments will affect the market of direct carrier billing (DCB) – we expect the changes with regards to strong customer authentication as well as transaction values. Industry consultations are ongoing.

DCB became quite significant these days, as it is often used in daily life payments e.g. for App Store, Netflix, Spotify, Google Pay, and other similar services.

The draft amendments introduce among others:

1. the obligation of the carrier to obtain the customer’s consent for DCB payments,
2. default DCB transaction limit of 35 PLN per month,
3. strong customer authentication (SCA) requirement.

Market participants entered into consultations with the Ministry, as they fear the planned changes will make their business impossible to implement in practice. The Ministry on the other hand announced that they will do their best to take suggestions from the market participants into consideration.